BLACK WORKERS have the collective power to challenge racial injustice in the workplace, Britain’s most senior black trade union official has said. In a New Year message, Dr Patrick Roach — who leads a 300,000 member teachers’ union – said “now is the time” to get involved in the movement so the collective power of labour can tackle structural racism.

Dr Roach, 57, who is chair of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) Anti-Racism Taskforce, which brings together union leaders from every sector, also said it was time to scrap the public sector pay freeze, which was more likely to deny black workers a pay rise. It was a “scandal” that too many employers were getting away with paying lip service to race equality at work, he said.

He told The Voice that black trade unionists should “use the leverage that we’ve got, the influence that we have, to speak up for working people, to speak up for our communities, against the government which, frankly, has been pursuing a hostile environment policy to the detriment of black communities, to the detriment of workers and of working class communities in general”.

Dr Roach, who is general-secretary of the teachers union NASUWT, added: “I want to see more black workers playing an active role within their trade unions. MAJOR “Whether that be as caseworkers, negotiators, organisers, or employees within trade unions, black workers are part of that process of bringing this change, about setting the agenda for what our unions say, and what our unions do in practice.”

Dr Roach is only the second black generalsecretary of a major union in British history, after Bill Morris led the Transport and General Workers’ Union (now Unite) from 1992 to 2003. The only other black union boss is Maheta Molango, who took over at the small footballers’ union, the Professional Footballers’ Association, in June last year following Gordon Taylor’s retirement.

Monitoring

The son of Jamaican parents who settled in Walsall, West Midlands, Dr Roach is a former teacher and lecturer in social policy. He was elected leader in 2020 after two decades of service as an official at the union, having previously served as deputy general secretary. TUC research found that unemployment rates for black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) workers rose three times as fast compared to white workers at the beginning of the economic dip.

As the UK appeared to be recovering from the Delta variant, the data also showed that BAME workers were rehired three times more slowly, proving a pattern of ‘first out, last in’ that was also seen at the start and end of the banking crisis of 2008-09.

“The government hasn’t really learned the lessons and has been very slow to respond, and even seeking to demonise black communities for getting the virus in the first place with this concept of ‘vaccine hesitancy.’”

This cannot be fully explained by factors like being more likely to be employed in sectors hardest hit by the pandemic, such as hospitality and retail; the figures suggest that ‘structural racism’ is also at play. In recent months, the TUC has also joined forces with the business federation the CBI to press prime minister Boris Johnson to introduce mandatory ethnicity pay monitoring, so that the public can see what the pay gaps between black and white workers looks like.

The Voice caught up with Dr Roach as the news agenda turned to rising cases of the highly transmissible Omicron variant. Dr Roach said the government had failed to learn the lessons over the way the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately hit black communities.

And as the country plunges into a new wave driven by the Omicron variant, he expressed fears that black families would be hit hardest once again.

Dr Roach said this was an employment issue as well as a public health one and that the government had been “divisive” in seeking to blame black communities for higher death rates, rather than address the workplace issues causing the problem, such as greater exposure to the virus on the frontline.

Measures

He said: “The government hasn’t really learned the lessons and has been very slow to respond, and even seeking to demonise black communities for getting the virus in the first place with this concept of ‘vaccine hesitancy.’

This has been extremely divisive and upsetting as well. “We know from the start of this pandemic just how acute the impact of this public health crisis was on black communities.

“This is an issue of racial justice, which we need to be focusing on alongside the rights of workers, and the rights of communities to be safe to have decent jobs and the opportunity to look after themselves and their families.

“These are the issues that really do matter in the context of how we deal with racism and the effects of racial injustice in workplaces, and in our society more generally.

“I’ve asked ministers during the pandemic to tell us what is their race equality impact assessment of their coronavirus measures, and what the response I’ve had is that ‘it’s not in the public interest’ to publish information. Well, it is in the interests of black communities.”

Trade unions have written to the equality minister, Liz Truss, about the government’s failure to publish equality impact assessments. In 2017, watchdog the Equalities and Human Rights Commission carried out an investigation into the Treasury’s failure to consider the ‘cumulative impact’ of tax and spend budget decisions on black communities and other disadvantaged sections of society, but chancellor Rishi Sunak is ignoring the findings.

COVID-19 deaths have had a massive disproportionate impact on black communities, with African and Caribbean people being three times more likely to die from the virus than white people. The picture is even worse for African men, who are up to four times more likely to die. Many trade unionists say the difficulty for some workers is getting time off work to get the jab, especially if they are working two or three jobs.

In addition, black workers are much more likely to be in insecure precarious work, such as delivery and cab drivers, which increase the risk of catching the virus. For every white worker, there are two BAME workers on zerohours contracts, and even more so for those on agency contracts.

Outsourcing

But it gets even worse; black workers who are not agency or on zero-hours contracts are still more likely to be under-employed than their white counterparts. They are also more likely to be working for outsourced companies.

This is a phenomenon that rapidly increased after the banking crisis when many auxiliary services, such as cleaning and catering, that were previously in the public sector were transferred to the private sector. Local authorities and institutions such as universities outsourced these services — which often had a far greater proportion of black workers — and this meant those workers experienced reduced pay, terms and conditions.

A knock-on effect was a reduction in union organising, because this is sometimes harder to do when working for a corporation than a democratic or publicly funded body.

There is growing concern that the explosion of outsourcing of previous public services to the private sector has disproportionately further impoverished black families that were already existing on a low income before having their employment transferred.

Unions are growing increasingly concerned about a new reshaping of the economy after the COVID crisis, with ‘fi re and rehire’ adding to the structural unfairness already caused by outsourcing and, before that, privatisation. This is when companies dismiss workers and immediately rehire them on worse pay, terms and conditions. Dr Roach said that fi re and rehire was already proven to be hitting black workers three times as hard.

The writer, Lester Holloway, previously worked for the TUC as policy officer for anti-racism which included being the secretariat to the Anti-Racism Taskforce.